Protected areas are composed of land, freshwater and marine areas set aside through legislation to protect representative examples of Canadas ecosystems. They are created and managed by the federal,
provincial and territorial governments. A small but increasing number is also administered by Aboriginal governments and communities. Some protected areas are jointly managed by two or more administrations. While this map focuses on public and
aboriginal protected areas, an increasing number of private lands are conserved by non-government organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Federal, provincial or territorial and Aboriginal protected areas are grouped separately on
this map to show their distribution throughout Canada in 2007. This map shows only the 1385 protected areas which are 10 square kilometres or larger.

Summary

(Plain Language Summary, not published)The map was originally published online in the Atlas of Canada, 6th Edition as an interactive digital map derived from a shapefile and mapped online
using MapServer, a platform for publishing spatial data to the web. In order to preserve the geographical content of this Edition during its publication from 1999 to 2009 all the maps have been converted from their online interactive form to a raster
and made available in PDF and JPEG.